So what lies down this road? A world in which key positions can only be filled by complete hacks, preferably interns from the Heritage Foundation with no relevant experience but unquestioned loyalty.

In short, we’re on our way to running America the way the Coalition Provisional Authority ran Iraq.

–Paul Krugman

 

Because there’s always room for just a little more pessimism in our lives, I bring you the above throughts from Paul Krugman, who despairs over the way in which any technically profficient political appointee that Barack Obama nominates  is invariably blocked by GOP partisans.

It’s been an on again, off again affair for the New York Times, trying to figure out how to make money publishing a newspaper while making its contents freely accessible to all on the web. A few years back, the Times experimented with a paywall, forcing users to pay $50.00 a year for access to the paper’s online content. Then, at one point, the paper hid only its opinion pages behind a paywall. Finally, (no doubt inspured in part by the protestations of its editorial contributors) the paper opened up again, offering all its content for free to anyone with a web browser and the ability to remember (or bookmark) the word: NYTIMES.COM. Read more »

The recent events in Wisconsin are, on one level, baffling. Somehow the GOP has convinced voters that the best way to balace state budgets is to squeeze the wages of middle class families –in this case public sector workers– while keeping taxes low for the wealthy. Today, a story on school property taxes in the New York Times sheds more light on this peculiar direction our country has taken. The article focuses on the decidedly upper crust community of Bronxville, New York, and the desire of its residents to maintain high academic standards and good schools, but not have to actually pay for them:

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If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it.

–GOP Rep. Peter King

NY Representative Peter King is holding hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims, using fabricated statistics to create the impression that American Muslims are on the whole supportive of terrorist violence against US interests. Yet his own past support for IRA terror campaigns against the British, including the above quote explicitly absolving of the IRA of responsibility for civilians killed in IRA terror bombings campaigns drives home the extent to which Republican posturing on the “war on terror” is little more than a hypocritical exercise in bigotry and demagoguery.

“No wonder Michelle Obama’s telling everybody, ‘you’d better breastfeed your baby.’ Yeah, you’d better, because the price of milk is so high right now!“

Sara Palin, apparently unaware that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children not be fed cow’s milk before their first year.

It kinda makes you wonder if Palin is the real mother of any of her children.

Because we probably should have a separate post for this news.

So here’s a nice Fox News headline decribing Illegal immigration as “America’s 3rd War.”

Yeah, that’s right, Murdoch’s propaganda network is equating undocumented workers coming to the US looking for work with armed, violent insurgents in Iraq and the Afghan Taliban.

Stay classy, Fox. And, oh yeah, next time armed, anti-immigrant, border vigilantes murder a 9 year old girl as she pleads for her life, remind us how you had nothing to do with it.